Special tribute to Jean-Luc Godard: The film, a 4K restoration, will be introduced by film critic, author, and scholar David Sterritt. Sterritt is chair of the National Society of Film Critics, editor-in-chief of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and a contributing writer at Cineaste. He is the author of The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible and editor of Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews.
Best Director Berlin Film Festival (1960)
On September 13th of this year, filmmaking pioneer Jean-Luc Godard passed away by assisted suicide. Prolific, inventive, politically radical, and aesthetically uncompromising until the very end (his final film, The Image Book, was released in 2018), there is no overstating Godard’s profound influence on the shape and style of modern cinema. His debut feature, Breathless (1960), was a watershed moment. Even more so than fellow French New Wave auteur Francois Truffaut’s Palme d’Or-winning The 400 Blows from the previous year, Breathless announced a cinematic language steeped in the iconography of classic Hollywood but disassembled into something far more angular and vivid. With seemingly unmotivated jump cuts inserted into scenes and long discursive conversations vacant of typical plot mechanics, Godard created a film with the dynamism of free jazz and the wit of puckish youth. The now legendary performances from Jean-Paul Belmondo, who plays a rakish Humphrey Bogart type, and Jean Seberg, in her iconic pixie crop barking “New York Herald Tribune” down the Champs-Élysées, present a picture of Hollywood romance made new through changing sexual mores, improvisatory acting, and self-conscious awareness of their cinematic antecedents. Even today, this crime caper feels buoyant and alive, a celluloid testament to art as rebellion. ~TW